Secret History: Werewolf Baculum
Greetings, gentle readers!
The mystery of la Bête du Gévaudan has remained unsolved for centuries, the truth held captive in the keepsakes and writings of Severin St. Noir, a key player unknown to popular history but now in part revealed to you through this item. The tale it tells is one of pathos and sorrow and terrible wildness, a tale at once repugnant to the human soul and deeply tragic.
When I examined it in a retrocognitive trance this artefact divulged a number of surprising secrets, some of which I cannot in good conscience share. The heiress of the St. Noir legacy is unavailable for comment, and her offspring are too far below the age of majority to offer any moral guidance. I therefore have confined my enquiry to events surrounding this particular trophy and have omitted the more personal details until such time as an adult member of the family can speak for them. I trust my gentle readers will forgive my circumspection. Given the unbearably intimate and deeply disturbing nature of the impressions, reproducing them for public titillation would only be ghoulish, anyway.
There will come a time when I, or the St. Noir family, shall step forward and tell the rest of Severin's story, but for now we must be content to hear a tale that began in 1764, high in the Margeride Mountains. . . .
Curiously yours,
Lorelei Knightley-Someday
***
Werewolf baculum
Gévaudan, France
Collected in 1767 by Severin St. Noir
Many innocent wolves were slain in the hunt for the Beasts of Gévaudan. The King dispatched his Lieutenant of the Hunt, François Antoine, to destroy the beast before the panic could spread. Lucien St. Noir, a mysterious 'naturalist' who came to Gévaudan in the spring of 1765, offered his assistance to Antoine, and in September of 1765 the two men spearheaded a massive hunt that ended with the death of an enormous wolf. It was identified by its scars as the Beast.
Antoine returned to Versailles with the corpse and received a rich reward. Lucien St. Noir remained in the province to make a study of the wildlife, but vanished in November while riding back to town in the early twilight.
Despite the destruction of the first Beast, killings began again in December and continued unabated for two years, casting a pall of terror over the beautiful province. In the summer of 1767, the bloodshed reached its peak. A hunter working under the obvious nom du chasse 'Pierre Louvart' arrived and announced his intention to track down and kill the marauding Beast. He was a louvretiere, a hunter who specialized in the destruction of wolves, and he offered his services to the stricken province.
As Lucien St. Noir had befriended François Antoine, Louvart befriended a local hunter named Jean Chastel. The two of them tracked the Beast for weeks. It remained always one step ahead, possessed of a preturnatural intelligence and an apparent enjoyment of human suffering. Despite widespread fear and superstition, despite the uncanny circumstances of many of the deaths, despite the fact that the Beast seemed to have a very human lust for vengeance, Louvart insisted that the Beast was merely an animal and that the reports of it walking upon two legs were but fantasies born of quite-understandable fear.
The deaths continued, the tide of blood unstanchable. Over a hundred died, most children and women. Chastel and Louvart redoubled their efforts. Still the Beast ravened and slew. It bypassed animal carcasses in favor of human prey. It ignored bait and poison, but would lay in wait for the hunters who would inevitably return to the traps. It tore the heads from its victims. It outran every pack of hounds set against it, and dogs eventually refused to track it at all.
On the nineteeth of June, 1767, the Beast caught Jean Chastel's hunting party off-guard, before the battue had commenced. Jean Chastel was kneeling, reading from the Bible. The Beast emerged from the trees and stood staring as Chastel calmly finished his prayer, raised his rifle, and shot it dead with a silver bullet.
Dead, the Beast proved - to nobody's surprise - to be a wolf of monstrous size. When its stomach was opened, human remains were found inside.
Chastel was celebrated as a hero. 'Pierre Louvart' vanished, taking his story - and certain trophies - with him. The predations ceased.
It was not until the Salem Institute came into possession of a certain memoir that Pierre Louvart was discovered to be Severin St. Noir, the brother of Lucien St. Noir.
Severin's memoir told a dire tale. The two louvretieres were attacked by a mad wolf while baiting a trap, and Lucien contracted that mystical contagion known as melancholic lycanthropia. The lust for human flesh this kindled in him was too much for the injured man to resist, and in the grip of lycanthropic fugue Lucien slaughtered the St. Noir family and left Severin for dead.
Having heard of the Beast, Lucien traveled to Gevaudan hoping that his own continuing misdeeds would be blamed upon the beast and that he, himself, might go unremarked and unpunished. And, indeed, Lucien's ruse worked - for a time.
Severin had survived the attack, and Lucien could not long escape his attention. Horrified, Severin vowed to destroy his brother.
The final hunt ended on that June morning with Jean Chastel kneeling in the leaves, a prayer on his lips. Severin, behind Chastel, stood as the Beast approached and revealed himself to his brother. The Beast froze for one moment too long.
What caused the Beast to hesitate? Why, after so long, did it allow itself to be slain so easily?
Despite what popular literature will tell you, the psychic energy released upon death does not create more vivid psychometric impressions. On the contrary, it washes out images or feelings, and seldom is there much for the retrocognitive to examine. Attempting to do so is quite unpleasant, in point of fact. Retrieving impressions from animal remains is chancy as well, and by the end Lucien was more animal than man.
The last few hours, even days, of Lucien's life are lost to us. We do not know what he may have thought, felt, feared, discovered, decided. He was shot. The hunters left. The killings ceased. That is all we know.
Severin's memoir describes the Beast's murders in horrific detail, but does not reveal his thoughts on the Beast's death. We do not know if he felt sorrow or relief, whether he mourned his brother, or had already grieved him, along with his destroyed family. We can only guess at the anger which led Severin to strip the corpse of trophies - of which, ironically, only this baculum now remains. It disturbs our modern sensibilities to think that he carried about these pieces of his own brother, but Severin was a brutal man doing a brutal job in a very different time, a man driven by rage and sorrow and his own inner demons. We must not judge him too harshly.
Severin St. Noir went on to become a great hunter of rogue beasts, werewolves in particular, and later wrote La chasse au loup-garou, still considered by louvretiers to be the foremost treatise on werewolf hunting.
It is to be noted that Severin never traveled without a certain silver flask from which he took regular draughts. While one cannot blame a man with so disturbing a past for developing a taste for liquor, it is known that Severin drank only from his own flask and eschewed all other alcohol entirely.
When questioned by a close acquaintance he once claimed that it was an herbal preparation meant to keep the pain of old wounds at bay.
For his sake, we may hope that it did.
The St. Noir papers entered the archives here at the Salem Institute Northwest through the Miracle Island Historical Trust. The donor, Mr. John Donovan, graciously confirmed that the artefact - which should never have been sold - was, indeed, the very one that had come into his possession when he assumed custody of Sibylla St. Noir's personal effects on the occasion of her disappearance into the caves beneath Medmenham Abbey.
We are indebted to Master Donovan, and to his minor wards, Saturnalia and Samhain, who provided this historian with much delight on the afternoon of March the twenty-third.
The mystery of la Bête du Gévaudan has remained unsolved for centuries, the truth held captive in the keepsakes and writings of Severin St. Noir, a key player unknown to popular history but now in part revealed to you through this item. The tale it tells is one of pathos and sorrow and terrible wildness, a tale at once repugnant to the human soul and deeply tragic.
When I examined it in a retrocognitive trance this artefact divulged a number of surprising secrets, some of which I cannot in good conscience share. The heiress of the St. Noir legacy is unavailable for comment, and her offspring are too far below the age of majority to offer any moral guidance. I therefore have confined my enquiry to events surrounding this particular trophy and have omitted the more personal details until such time as an adult member of the family can speak for them. I trust my gentle readers will forgive my circumspection. Given the unbearably intimate and deeply disturbing nature of the impressions, reproducing them for public titillation would only be ghoulish, anyway.
There will come a time when I, or the St. Noir family, shall step forward and tell the rest of Severin's story, but for now we must be content to hear a tale that began in 1764, high in the Margeride Mountains. . . .
Curiously yours,
Lorelei Knightley-Someday
***
Werewolf baculum
Gévaudan, France
Collected in 1767 by Severin St. Noir
Many innocent wolves were slain in the hunt for the Beasts of Gévaudan. The King dispatched his Lieutenant of the Hunt, François Antoine, to destroy the beast before the panic could spread. Lucien St. Noir, a mysterious 'naturalist' who came to Gévaudan in the spring of 1765, offered his assistance to Antoine, and in September of 1765 the two men spearheaded a massive hunt that ended with the death of an enormous wolf. It was identified by its scars as the Beast.
Antoine returned to Versailles with the corpse and received a rich reward. Lucien St. Noir remained in the province to make a study of the wildlife, but vanished in November while riding back to town in the early twilight.
Despite the destruction of the first Beast, killings began again in December and continued unabated for two years, casting a pall of terror over the beautiful province. In the summer of 1767, the bloodshed reached its peak. A hunter working under the obvious nom du chasse 'Pierre Louvart' arrived and announced his intention to track down and kill the marauding Beast. He was a louvretiere, a hunter who specialized in the destruction of wolves, and he offered his services to the stricken province.
As Lucien St. Noir had befriended François Antoine, Louvart befriended a local hunter named Jean Chastel. The two of them tracked the Beast for weeks. It remained always one step ahead, possessed of a preturnatural intelligence and an apparent enjoyment of human suffering. Despite widespread fear and superstition, despite the uncanny circumstances of many of the deaths, despite the fact that the Beast seemed to have a very human lust for vengeance, Louvart insisted that the Beast was merely an animal and that the reports of it walking upon two legs were but fantasies born of quite-understandable fear.
The deaths continued, the tide of blood unstanchable. Over a hundred died, most children and women. Chastel and Louvart redoubled their efforts. Still the Beast ravened and slew. It bypassed animal carcasses in favor of human prey. It ignored bait and poison, but would lay in wait for the hunters who would inevitably return to the traps. It tore the heads from its victims. It outran every pack of hounds set against it, and dogs eventually refused to track it at all.
On the nineteeth of June, 1767, the Beast caught Jean Chastel's hunting party off-guard, before the battue had commenced. Jean Chastel was kneeling, reading from the Bible. The Beast emerged from the trees and stood staring as Chastel calmly finished his prayer, raised his rifle, and shot it dead with a silver bullet.
Dead, the Beast proved - to nobody's surprise - to be a wolf of monstrous size. When its stomach was opened, human remains were found inside.
Chastel was celebrated as a hero. 'Pierre Louvart' vanished, taking his story - and certain trophies - with him. The predations ceased.
It was not until the Salem Institute came into possession of a certain memoir that Pierre Louvart was discovered to be Severin St. Noir, the brother of Lucien St. Noir.
Severin's memoir told a dire tale. The two louvretieres were attacked by a mad wolf while baiting a trap, and Lucien contracted that mystical contagion known as melancholic lycanthropia. The lust for human flesh this kindled in him was too much for the injured man to resist, and in the grip of lycanthropic fugue Lucien slaughtered the St. Noir family and left Severin for dead.
Having heard of the Beast, Lucien traveled to Gevaudan hoping that his own continuing misdeeds would be blamed upon the beast and that he, himself, might go unremarked and unpunished. And, indeed, Lucien's ruse worked - for a time.
Severin had survived the attack, and Lucien could not long escape his attention. Horrified, Severin vowed to destroy his brother.
The final hunt ended on that June morning with Jean Chastel kneeling in the leaves, a prayer on his lips. Severin, behind Chastel, stood as the Beast approached and revealed himself to his brother. The Beast froze for one moment too long.
What caused the Beast to hesitate? Why, after so long, did it allow itself to be slain so easily?
Despite what popular literature will tell you, the psychic energy released upon death does not create more vivid psychometric impressions. On the contrary, it washes out images or feelings, and seldom is there much for the retrocognitive to examine. Attempting to do so is quite unpleasant, in point of fact. Retrieving impressions from animal remains is chancy as well, and by the end Lucien was more animal than man.
The last few hours, even days, of Lucien's life are lost to us. We do not know what he may have thought, felt, feared, discovered, decided. He was shot. The hunters left. The killings ceased. That is all we know.
Severin's memoir describes the Beast's murders in horrific detail, but does not reveal his thoughts on the Beast's death. We do not know if he felt sorrow or relief, whether he mourned his brother, or had already grieved him, along with his destroyed family. We can only guess at the anger which led Severin to strip the corpse of trophies - of which, ironically, only this baculum now remains. It disturbs our modern sensibilities to think that he carried about these pieces of his own brother, but Severin was a brutal man doing a brutal job in a very different time, a man driven by rage and sorrow and his own inner demons. We must not judge him too harshly.
Severin St. Noir went on to become a great hunter of rogue beasts, werewolves in particular, and later wrote La chasse au loup-garou, still considered by louvretiers to be the foremost treatise on werewolf hunting.
It is to be noted that Severin never traveled without a certain silver flask from which he took regular draughts. While one cannot blame a man with so disturbing a past for developing a taste for liquor, it is known that Severin drank only from his own flask and eschewed all other alcohol entirely.
When questioned by a close acquaintance he once claimed that it was an herbal preparation meant to keep the pain of old wounds at bay.
For his sake, we may hope that it did.
The St. Noir papers entered the archives here at the Salem Institute Northwest through the Miracle Island Historical Trust. The donor, Mr. John Donovan, graciously confirmed that the artefact - which should never have been sold - was, indeed, the very one that had come into his possession when he assumed custody of Sibylla St. Noir's personal effects on the occasion of her disappearance into the caves beneath Medmenham Abbey.
We are indebted to Master Donovan, and to his minor wards, Saturnalia and Samhain, who provided this historian with much delight on the afternoon of March the twenty-third.